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Category: Windows Phone Basics

Geofencing was one of the newest features Windows Phone 8.1 provided and for the developers it indeed was cool. Previously people did it their way but it’s always better to have an api in our hand. So, before digging into that i strongly suggest you guys to read my previous 2 articles if you haven’t done it already.

These two would get you started pretty fast and you’d probably want that. If you already read my aforementioned 2 articles, I expect you know how to use a map control in Windows Phone 8.1. We’re going to need that later.

Geofencing:

Geofencing is a mechanism where you put a virtual boundary around a specific point of interest and you want to interact with the user when you arrive or leave that specific boundary. You seriously can do pretty amazing stuff with it actually.

Initial Work:

Now, let’s take a more practical approach to this, every time I go into my room, Im supposed to check my mails. But I usually forget that. How cool it would be if my phone reminds me every time I get into my room and tells me to check my mail? 😉

So, let’s go ahead and create a new Windows Phone app and name it GeoFencingTest. Now, lets see how to do that actually.

So, first of all go over your Package.appxmanifest file and go to the Capabilities Tab and select the Location capability.

Now, when you are done with that, let’s move on and start cracking. Before going deep lets get a basic UI running. And it looks like following:

Before going in deep on what is for what let’s get some basic stuff done. Let’s get our current location first.

Since you guys have seen in the last articles, it’s fairly easy to do so. All I’m doing here is get the current location using Geolocator and put the Latitude, Longitude and Altitude into the textblocks defined in the MainPage.xaml.

The only thing that is interesting here is having a CancellationToken generated from a CancellationTokenSource. Usually these are used if you really want control over your task after it’s being fired, the rest of the procedure should look familiar as it’s a basic Geolocator usage to find current geolocation.

Setting up a GeoFence:

Now comes the setting up the actual GeoFence part and even this is fairly simple. The method looks like the following:

The first one is definitely the GeofenceKey. Put a GeofenceKey in position just to identify a specific Geofence. I put s generic string to identify my home geofence.

Then I called up GetMyHomeLocation() method to set the geofence center to the location of my room. This will identify the center of our desired Geofence.

And the next thing to define is a radius that will define the radius of our circular geofence. We are using Geocircle object to define our geofence here, thus we are using a center and a radius in meters to defined our geofence. You can definitely see the next thing we did is define our geocircle. Actually the Geofence takes a Geoshape object to define it’s radius and currently only Geocircle is supported.

Now, we have put a checkbox in our XAML named SingleUse. This is supposed to define whether our geofence would be used for only one time or not. You can set up temporary one time used geofence using this.

bool singleUse = (bool)SingleUse.IsChecked;

Now, the next thing we did is we defined how our desired geofence would be treated. Which events are we considering with this geofence? Should this be fired only when we get into that geofence or should this will only be considered when we exit the geofence, or even we remove the geofence? We can actually select all or a subset of that group. So we used Logical OR operator to add up all the cases we want our geofence to react upon.

Let’s move on into the time domain now. Now we need to figure how long we need to stay in our favourite geofence to trigger up it’s desired events. I put a textbox in front to define that in seconds, if that is defined, we fire out events from our geofence in that number of seconds and if not we fire out events in our default dwell time defined by 0 seconds.

// setting up how long you need to be in geofence for enter event to fire
TimeSpan dwellTime;
dwellTime = DwellTime.Text!=&quot;&quot;? ParseTimeSpan(DwellTime.Text) : TimeSpan.FromSeconds(DefaultDwellTimeInSeconds);

You can even define how long a geofence should be up and running. Like I want my rooms geofence to be running for next 10 days.

// setting up how long the geofence should be active
TimeSpan GeoFenceDuration;
GeoFenceDuration = TimeSpan.FromDays(10);

Even with that thing defined, one question remains, even though it will run for 10 days, when does the geofence gets activated so it can start counting to that defined 10 days. Answer is right below:

// setting up the start time of the geofence
DateTimeOffset GeoFenceStartTime = DateTimeOffset.Now;

Well, the only thing left to do is create our desired geofence and add it to GeofenceMonitor.

Now, that’s how you create your own geofence and add it to the GeofenceMonitor. Now you might wonder that whether you’d really have to define all that parameters to create a geofence. Not actually, the littlest you can do is define an Id and a Geocircle to start your geofence. 😉 The rest of the values would take the default assumption.

Handling GeoFence Notifications on Foreground:

We have all our background work to create a geofence but we wont be able to do a single thing unless we test our geofence. Now, we have already defined that our geofence would trigger events after the aforementioned dwellTime and will trigger events if I enter or leave it. So, I definitely have to attach a event handler at a certain place. Don’t I?

Before that, let’s create the method stub for the click event handler for CreateGeoFencingButton and start SetupGeofence() method inside it. If you don’t know how to do that, select the CreateGeoFencingButton in XAML, go to properties, select events tab and double click on the click textbox.

There you go! That’s how you set up your geofence in an app running in the foreground.

Setting up GeoFence on the background:

Now, this is where things get a little bit tricky. There’s a number of steps involved in this.

Create a Windows Runtime Component Project and add it to your solution.

Change Package.appxmanifest to declare the BackgroundTask that has been created.

Register the BackgroundTask

Handle Geofence Notifications from Background Task

Create a Windows Runtime Component Project:

Usually, background tasks are windows runtime component so you have to add one to your solution. Please go over to your solution and add a Windows Runtime Project.

After the new project is created go over class1.cs and rename it to your liking . I renamed it to BackgroundTask and added IBackgroundTask interface to the class and implemented it. I didn’t write anything afterwards. Let’s just keep it like that for a while and move to our GeofenceTest Project. Go over references and add the newly created GeofenceTask.BackgroundGeofenceTask project to it. So our Wp8.1 project now has reference to the GeofenceTask.BackgroundGeofenceTask project.

Change Package.appxmanifest to declare the BackgroundTask:

Now let’s scoot over to our Package.appxmanifest file and go over Declarations tab. From Available Declarations combobox select BackgroundTask and select loction under the Properties list.

Now on the Entry point field please put the full qualified assembly name of your newly created background task. Don’t get confused. It’s fairly easy. Let’s have a look at BackgroundGeofenceTask class first.

Let’s see what we have in here now. The very first one is get the BackgroundAccessStatus. That helps us to know whether our application is capable of accessing BackgroundTasks. Now, let’s move up and use BackgroundTaskBuilder to create the background task we intend to create. Now, if you look at the TaskEntryPoint we provided there, you’d now realize why we created our Background Task project before and added it to the manifest. Because we are using the same entry point name here. I put a name to identify the background task. This is needed as if there is another background task with the same name you would be thrown an exception. If you want to know whether there is another BackgroundTask with the same name you can iterate through BackgroundTaskRegistration.AllTasks and then make sure whether there is one with the same name or not. You can use a method like the following to do so:

The next thing that comes off is defining the LocationTrigger for the BackgroundTaskBuilder object. So, we defined a new LocationTrigger of type LocationTriggerType.Geofence and used SetTrigger method to set it up. Then we used BackgroundTaskBuilder object to register the task and we instantiated a GeofenceTask_Completed event handler for that too.

At the bottom you’d see a switch with backgroundAccessStatus and putting a MessageDialog when it’s denied or unspecified.

Handle Geofence Notifications from Background Task:

So, lets move to our Windows Runtime Component which actually is the Background Task project and implement the IBackgroundTask interface. A method named

public void Run(IBackgroundTaskInstance taskInstance)

would pop up, we’d put our regular geofence event handling in there like there in the Foreground example. Now it looks like following when we are handling it from background

Now, this looks a wee bit different from the first example. The first change that is noticable is that we are now selecting the reports based on our geofence id and the report’s new state. As we are in background now, we are using our geofence id to get the proper geofence from the whole list. And as now we are in background we are using a Toast Notification instead of a MessageDialog to show our notification.

Handling it from the App Side:

Now you guys might get confused what to do with the foreground code we made earlier. Do we need Current_GeofenceStateChanged event handler anymore. Now here we might have to be a bit careful. Now if we want our app to react different when it is on foreground and make some UI changes it needed then we have to use GeofenceTask_Completed event rather than Current_GeofenceStateChanged. And there’s another thing to be added. We get our GeofenceMonitor Reports using GeofenceMonitor.Current.ReadReports() and this step can only be done once for every change. So if your background reads it first then, your foreground app would not be able to read it. So, we have to save it somewhere when the background reads it so our foreground app can read it from there.

So we are using ApplicationData.Current.LocalSettings to save our state in the Background Task. If you look closely you’d find the following snippet:

You can definitely test the app on the emulator. Like always click the debug button with a emulator selected as the device and when it opens go to additional tools button and open up the location tab. Select a close location to your geofence, I did select a close one to my room and the status changed itself to “Entered”. It was that easy! You can even try the foreground example in the same way!

Frame rootFrame = Window.Current.Content as Frame;
// Do not repeat app initialization when the Window already has content,
// just ensure that the window is active
if (rootFrame == null)
{
// Create a Frame to act as the navigation context and navigate to the first page
rootFrame = new Frame();
// MT: Register the Frame with the SuspensionManager.
SuspensionManager.RegisterFrame(rootFrame, "rootFrameKey");

First Words

This article points to a simple, fast way to record audio in Windows Phone 8.1. As the old Microphone class is no longer available, Windows Phone 8.1 came with new MediaCapture class to consolidate the media recording part for audio and video together. So, why waiting, let’s see how to do it!

Let’s get busy

I jotted a very simple GUI for this that has three simple buttons named “Capture Audio”, “Stop Capture” and “Play Capture”. And it looks as follows:

If you guys want to have a closer look at the XAML behind, peek a look:

So, the very first thing done here is the initialization of the MediaCapture class. Every media capture is associated with a MediaCaptureInitializationSettings instance. We’ve set the StreamingCaptureMode to Audio to make sure this is only audio recording rather than video. There were two bool variables declared before named _rawAudioSupported and _userRequestedRaw. Although I didn’t hook them up from GUI, you guys can defintiely try hooking them up from GUI and thus you can give the app a choice to record raw or pointing it to default audio processing.

The next thing to do is initializing the _mediaCaptureManager with the settings provided. I have included two event handlers for RecordingLimitExceeded and Failed. You guys can write your own handlers of course in these cases.

Now, usually you can put the InitializeAudioRecording method where your app initializes. I put it here on MainPage constructor.

If you have a good look on the code you will see we declared a filename first. And then we created a file in our VideosLibrary using KnownFolders.VideosLibrary.CreateFileAsync that actually points to the media and video library of windows phone 8.1 with a given filename and we also gave a CreationCollisionOption.GenerateUniqueName that says it will create a unique name in case of collision. The next thing to do is creating a recording profile using MediaEncodingProfile class and you can get all possible recording profiles for videos and audios from here. I created a M4a audio profile using MediaEncodingProfile.CreateM4a(recordProfile, this._recordStorageFile) method.

All we have left to do is now start the recording, so let’s go ahead and start the recording. And it’s easy as pie with _mediaCaptureManager.StartRecordToStorageFileAsync(recordProfile, this._recordStorageFile)

Stopping Recording

Stopping the recording is quiet easy too. All you have to do is call _mediaCaptureManager.StopRecordAsync()

Playing Recording

Playing a recording kind of consists of two tasks. First we have to open the recorded file and then play it. If you guys remember we used StorageFile _recordStorageFile to define our file that will hold the recording.

First Words

Usually when someone is working on Windows Phone 8.1 and usually if he’s the guy who just came from Windows Phone 8 development, the first thing he misses is all the toolkits lying around like the Windows Phone Toolkit or Coding4Fun Toolkits. Thus, missing a rating control is not new. So, let’s get our hands dirty and make a little 5 starred rating control fast enough to solve our problem at least to a minimum extent.

Design First!

Okay, to do this thing fast, we might need to make at least a little bit of groundwork in design, I’m going to use Microsoft Expression Design for it. You guys can get the free version from here. It’s pretty lightweight and we can practically export stuff straight to Blend for Visual Studio!

So, let’s go over Microsoft Expression Blend and create a new document. Take a size to your preference as you need it. Let’s draw some stars! To get started, look on the left toolbar and select Polygons.

After you select polygons, drag your mouse pointer in the artboard to draw anything that pops off. Now, it might be any kind of polygon, starting from a triangle, like the following came up with too much of points.

To rectify this, we need to make sure it has 5 points and an inner depth above 40% and close to 50% so it looks like a star, you can modify the existing one you made or set the proper settings and make a new one. To do that, look on the right on Edit Polygon dialog and change the points to 5 and move the innder depth to 47%. If you want to create a new one you will see the dialog name is Create Polygon. You can go for anything in between 45% tp 50%, I used 47% in this case.

Now, with the proper settings set with the polygon give it a yellowish shade and no borders please. And copy the stars and set them side by side so you can have 5 stars in a line that resembles a regular rating control. So, in the artboard it might look pretty close to the one following:

Now, what we want to do is put these together on a gradient so it resembles more to the rating control. But before we go do that, we need to make the stars act as a compound path together. So, lets go ahead and select all of them and select Object -> Compound Path -> Make so all the stars can work as a compound path.

Now, it’s time to put a gradient over it. Select a yellow to white gradient and put it on your rating control from left to right. Now, there comes a trick, at first you will see the color melted down in the middle, in a rating control we need a clear difference of color to make sure that it looks like one.

Now, click on the gradient bar in the middle to put a gradient stop in there.

Now, drag the midpoints (the dots over the gradient bar) and put them together to make the color difference more prominent.

Now, if we move the Gradient Stop now, we will see the color changes are more prominent and the starts look a lot like rating control now.

Now let’s go over Visual Studio and create a Windows Phone 8.1 Project. Let’s put a Right Click on the solution name and add a user control.

Now, lets select the user control and open it on blend. Let’s select all the stars, copy it and just paste it on the grid of the user control. To your surprise, this thing will just get copied to blend just fine. And let’s make the height of the user control to 40 and the width to 200 just to get the user control to appropriate proportion. I copied a set of stars and put the background to a very light gray color and put it behind the ones we copied at first so it looks a bit more prominent even in a white background.

Now, the xaml for the usercontrol will look somewhat like the following:

Code Comes Along

Now if we remember stuff clearly, when we moved the gradient stop in blend it looked like the rating bar value is changing. We just need to emulate that in code, that’s it. So, all we need to is change the Offset of <GradientStop> ‘s in LinearGradientBrush entry inside <Path.Fill>. So, we have to databind the offset from backend so we can access it from the usercontrol. And please remember this have to be 0.0 to 1 of course as thats the range for the offset value.

I renamed my user control to RatingControl and let’s move back to the code backend of RatingControl.xaml

Now, our job was to hook up the Value provided from backend. Now I used two DependencyProperty here instead of one because we are going to attach the value in the xaml using a element binding. The first DependencyProperty RateValueProperty has a PropertyMetadata of 0.1 and a function is attached to update the value in the xaml control (update the offset from the xaml).

And Value is the actual DependencyProperty Attached to the control and as it’s private it’s accessible only from inside. So we are exposing it using the RateValueProperty and update it with the Value Dependency Property. You can only use Value and expose it if you want.

Now all we have to do is hook it up in the xaml:

Let’s add a name to the Rating Control. Lets just add x:Name=”UserControl” in the UserControl Tag. And let’s tag the GradientStop property Offset on the ElementName “UserControl”. So, let’s modify the GradientStop tags as following: